As Halloween rolls around, Harvard’s most terrifying fiends are not hiding under your bed. Instead, they are the “Sunday Scaries,” the anxiety-fueling monsters that rear their heads after the shining euphoria of Saturday night fades away. This October season, the Sunday Scaries wreak havoc on Harvard campus.
It all begins around 2 p.m. on Sunday afternoon, when the Harvard student awakens with a raging headache. After a long, lukewarm shower—the plumbing in Wigglesworth is faulty again—they sense movement behind them. As they turn slowly, heart pounding, they catch a glimpse of an eye peeking out from behind the shower curtain.
What could it be this time? The creature’s eye is piercing and calculating, anticipating every action of the student. The enemy is impossible to foil or avoid. It is a many-headed hydra, ready to strike at any moment. Suddenly, the figure unveils himself and unleashes his weapon of destruction: a selfie stick.
“No!” screams the student, struggling to pull up their slipping towel. But it is too late. The footage is already on YouTube.
The Omnipresent Tourist is only the first “scary” that students risk meeting on a Sunday (or any day, for that matter).
If they muster the energy to enter a library, they risk undergoing a strange and frightening transformation. In the dark corners of Lamont, the Lamonsters are born. These new creatures are hunch-backed, nocturnal, brown-teethed students, begging for another Brain Break to fuel their substandard coffee addiction.
At Harvard, it isn’t the bright light of the moon that triggers a metamorphosis; rather it is the dim lighting of Cabot basement, where professors surreptitiously attempt to induce vampirism in their students. Cobwebs of math equations cover the walls. Cabot Vampires become as pale as their p-set pages, silent study cubes entrapping them in glass aquarium confines where they spend their nights. If a student manages to escape, they will have to wait until morning for sunlight and food. Let’s hope that’s enough to reverse the vampiric transition.
If there’s one Harvard horror that Lamonsters and Cabot Vampires share, it’s The Phantom of the P-set, which traps unwitting students in a dark, gloomy lair of STEM.
Students have tried to evade this ever-present Phantom using a variety of tactics. “Last Sunday, my teacher emailed me and said I submitted the wrong p-set. I did indeed purposefully submit the wrong p-set; I needed more time for my real one,” said Aditi Kona ’26, a Cabot Vampire.
Sometimes, however, there is no eluding this horror. “It was a three-problem p-set. There were no parts to the question, but somehow each problem still took me an hour. It would be impossible to do myself without the Math Question Center,” explained Oscar Bocelli ’26, a local Lamonster.
The HWCD (the Harvard College Walking Dead, for the uninitiated) also remain a looming Sunday Scary threat. These students appear just like everyone else—although a bit peppier and preppier—but have been so drained of all hopes and aspirations that only one thing remains: an unquenching thirst for Goldman Sachs. These creatures entrap you by generating such a fervor of FOMO and anxiety around your own professional future, that you seemingly voluntarily agree to join them. There’s only one dark path ahead: a consulting club.
This Halloween weekend, to ward off the Sunday Scaries skulking in your classrooms, dorms, and most dangerously your brain, make sure to take care of yourself. Remain hydrated, stay away from the libraries, and keep your eyes open for any terror the Sunday Scaries could bring.
Kate Kadyan ’26 (katekadyan@college.harvard.edu) and Gauri Sood ’26 (gaurisood@college.harvard.edu) are Cabot Vampires by choice.